To the manna born

Sydney’s culinary renaissance continues, with the city’s two newest restaurants –
Matt Moran
’s Chiswick and Greek diner The Apollo – drawing star crowds already. Moran opened his doors last week and already
News
Ltd chief
Kim Williams
and his wife Catherine Dovey have dropped in for supper, while
Sarah Murdoch,
Malcolm Turnbull
and his wife
Lucy
braved the rain for The Apollo on Wednesday evening.

But Taste of Sydney’s opening party on Thursday was sadly rained out. The sun did shine all weekend and 21,000 people rolled through the turnstiles to enjoy eminently affordable morsels from Otto’s Richard Ptacnik, Flying Fish’s Peter Kuruvita, Four in Hand’s Colin Fassnidge (soon to open his new Surry Hills diner 4 fourteen), Sake’s Shaun Presland and My Kitchen Rules host Manu Feildel.

Incidentally, we’ve learned from Manu’s website that “French chef Manu Feildel was destined to become a great chef from the moment he was born".

This bold declaration unwittingly evoked Cuisine du Moi, a wicked book by The Age’s wine writer Ben Canaider, in which the celebrity chef Gavin Canardeux recalls his first ever dinner.

“I was seven hours old . . . and my father and I smoked a pre-dinner Monte Cristo #47 as I fixed a couple of dry martinis . . . Having only hours before been born, I was that hungry I could’ve eaten road kill – which is organic of course, so it is fine for babies . . . I felt humbled by this experience. But I also felt enraged because while I was being feted and charmed and photographed at this amazingly simple yet perfect restaurant, there were people my own age in other parts of the world – like West Korea, East Samoa and sub-tropical Argentina – who weren’t getting the same restaurant-quality food and beverages as I was. That’s the moment when I knew. That’s the moment when I told Mum to stop f***ing well mollycoddling me and let me do the thing I had to do. To go into the world and get restaurants sorted. Then she gave me a credit card. ‘Go Gavin! Go!’ she said. And I went."

We can now see that Canaider had plenty of real life material for inspiration.